Dogs all the way down
Apr. 9th, 2026 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormSo just over a week ago Solly got her first TPLO surgery. If you don't know what that is, it's where they take the end of the tibia, cut it off, and rotate it about 20 degrees to create a stable platform for the joint. It's done when the tendons tear, which is ultra common in big dogs -- especially in big dogs who are "explosively" active, which is to say do sudden movements but not necessarily just a lot of movement, and I suspect in dogs who aren't carefully bred to avoid it.
Solly's ACL (or CCL on dogs and ACL on humans?) tendons were both gone. She was running around ok because, as I learned from Avallu, these dogs are more stoic than one can imagine, but it wasn't going to last long, and it hurt a lot. This surgery, or euthanasia after not too long, were the options. Back when I learned about this a friend offered to help me with the cost of surgery. Neither of us knew it would be just a few days after Avallu died. I cannot properly express how grateful I am that we can do this, that I'm not staring down losing two dogs in one year.
A week ago she went in and we came home with a big ziploc baggie full of pill bottles, a couple pages of instructions, a series of one-a-week phone calls with the vet scheduled, and advice from the vet to take it one day at a time.
She was heavily drugged for the ride home, because it's a roughly two-hour drive to the vet, and she's not supposed to be on the leg much for the first two weeks. She had the whole backseat of the truck with the seats out. Even so she sat up in her big cone collar, her chin propped on the console next to my arm, with her head slooooowly drifting downwards into a doze on the console and then snapping up groggily over and over to watch the road ahead.
After a couple days she started crying quietly in her crate. She was also reluctant to go in, though she would if I was insistent. She didn't cry when let out to curl up -- on leash, always on leash -- on the floor, and I finally realized that she couldn't fully stretch out in the crate and she wanted to stretch her surgery leg and her head both. From the tip of the cone collar to her toe when stretched out is over 5', there isn't a crate like that made, so I rigged up the hallway downstairs and she's much more comfortable in a nice 8' chunk of hallway, but only after sleeping on the sofa downstairs with her leash in hand a couple days. We're both happier now.
The cats are pretty happy because they can headbutt her and rub between her legs easily and she can't interfere with the cone, though if they're happy enough to purr she'll growl at them. She's never learned to properly interpret purrs as anything other than a growl.
I think the antibiotics were rough on her stomach. She's never been a big eater anyhow, and under her floof she has always been skinny. The meds are all take-with-food but I could barely get food into her at all; when the antibiotics were over, which coincided with the hallway change, she's started eating a bit more. We've also managed to find a pill solution. she chews her food carefully and can spit out pills except, I recently realized, if they're in roast beef chunks. So we're doing that and we're all relieved. She does not like pilling and in the beginning she had seven pills twice a day, and she'd growl to signal she needed a break after 4 or so, then after ten minutes would accept the others. I very quickly was reminded to cut my fingernails real short for it too.
It's astonishing she still loves me, honestly, but she clearly does. She knows the routine, recently shifted from 4x outside just to pee to 4x outside to pee and a 5 minute walk. She'll go willingly into the house (even when she was crated) after our walk, though she has been very happy to do bits of perimiter patrol on our walks. She even accepts the physio exercises, flexing and extending the leg and getting it massaged. I try very hard to allocate time, not just for the walk, but right afterwards for love and snuggles indoors so she doesn't just get dumped indoors and left totally alone.
We've made it through one week and done lots of learning. After this week it's supposed to get a lot easier. I know her wound is itchy, she keeps trying to lick it through her collar, but it's closing up nicely and the scabs are almost off it. Once that's healed the infection risk is I think gone, and I'll be relieved. The other risk is the plate holding on the end of her bone snapping (!!!!!!) which I can't do anything to tell how it is, just look at the joint and marvel. She's starting to put some weight on that leg already though, a bit limpingly, but it's happening, and that's what the vet wants.
Soon she'll be putting more weight on that leg than the other if all goes well, because it will hurt less than the still-torn side, and we get to go through it all over again with the other leg but with a lot more knowledge and understanding of each other.
It's good timing. It's a good time for me to be immersed in caring for one of my pups, just when I'm reminded how precious they are, and when a distraction isn't bad for me at all. It's a good time to get to know Solly better and be astonished at her immense heart, at her willingness to do what I ask, at her ability to laugh in the face of pain and strange happenings.
Meanwhile Thea guards the outside alone, and Avallu's memorial spot in the garden turns over and over in my mind until I have time and energy to create his stone to set in his favourite place.
Solly's ACL (or CCL on dogs and ACL on humans?) tendons were both gone. She was running around ok because, as I learned from Avallu, these dogs are more stoic than one can imagine, but it wasn't going to last long, and it hurt a lot. This surgery, or euthanasia after not too long, were the options. Back when I learned about this a friend offered to help me with the cost of surgery. Neither of us knew it would be just a few days after Avallu died. I cannot properly express how grateful I am that we can do this, that I'm not staring down losing two dogs in one year.
A week ago she went in and we came home with a big ziploc baggie full of pill bottles, a couple pages of instructions, a series of one-a-week phone calls with the vet scheduled, and advice from the vet to take it one day at a time.
She was heavily drugged for the ride home, because it's a roughly two-hour drive to the vet, and she's not supposed to be on the leg much for the first two weeks. She had the whole backseat of the truck with the seats out. Even so she sat up in her big cone collar, her chin propped on the console next to my arm, with her head slooooowly drifting downwards into a doze on the console and then snapping up groggily over and over to watch the road ahead.
After a couple days she started crying quietly in her crate. She was also reluctant to go in, though she would if I was insistent. She didn't cry when let out to curl up -- on leash, always on leash -- on the floor, and I finally realized that she couldn't fully stretch out in the crate and she wanted to stretch her surgery leg and her head both. From the tip of the cone collar to her toe when stretched out is over 5', there isn't a crate like that made, so I rigged up the hallway downstairs and she's much more comfortable in a nice 8' chunk of hallway, but only after sleeping on the sofa downstairs with her leash in hand a couple days. We're both happier now.
The cats are pretty happy because they can headbutt her and rub between her legs easily and she can't interfere with the cone, though if they're happy enough to purr she'll growl at them. She's never learned to properly interpret purrs as anything other than a growl.
I think the antibiotics were rough on her stomach. She's never been a big eater anyhow, and under her floof she has always been skinny. The meds are all take-with-food but I could barely get food into her at all; when the antibiotics were over, which coincided with the hallway change, she's started eating a bit more. We've also managed to find a pill solution. she chews her food carefully and can spit out pills except, I recently realized, if they're in roast beef chunks. So we're doing that and we're all relieved. She does not like pilling and in the beginning she had seven pills twice a day, and she'd growl to signal she needed a break after 4 or so, then after ten minutes would accept the others. I very quickly was reminded to cut my fingernails real short for it too.
It's astonishing she still loves me, honestly, but she clearly does. She knows the routine, recently shifted from 4x outside just to pee to 4x outside to pee and a 5 minute walk. She'll go willingly into the house (even when she was crated) after our walk, though she has been very happy to do bits of perimiter patrol on our walks. She even accepts the physio exercises, flexing and extending the leg and getting it massaged. I try very hard to allocate time, not just for the walk, but right afterwards for love and snuggles indoors so she doesn't just get dumped indoors and left totally alone.
We've made it through one week and done lots of learning. After this week it's supposed to get a lot easier. I know her wound is itchy, she keeps trying to lick it through her collar, but it's closing up nicely and the scabs are almost off it. Once that's healed the infection risk is I think gone, and I'll be relieved. The other risk is the plate holding on the end of her bone snapping (!!!!!!) which I can't do anything to tell how it is, just look at the joint and marvel. She's starting to put some weight on that leg already though, a bit limpingly, but it's happening, and that's what the vet wants.
Soon she'll be putting more weight on that leg than the other if all goes well, because it will hurt less than the still-torn side, and we get to go through it all over again with the other leg but with a lot more knowledge and understanding of each other.
It's good timing. It's a good time for me to be immersed in caring for one of my pups, just when I'm reminded how precious they are, and when a distraction isn't bad for me at all. It's a good time to get to know Solly better and be astonished at her immense heart, at her willingness to do what I ask, at her ability to laugh in the face of pain and strange happenings.
Meanwhile Thea guards the outside alone, and Avallu's memorial spot in the garden turns over and over in my mind until I have time and energy to create his stone to set in his favourite place.
